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The Death of ihaveanidea

Article: ihaveanidea — February 09, 2006

Author: Jay Thompson
VP of Stuff
ihaveanidea

Four weeks ago ihaveanidea almost died when the hard drive on my PowerBook with all of ihaveanidea’s contact information, mailing lists, templates, invoices, interviews, articles and directories failed. Worst of all, nothing on the hard drive was ever properly backed up. So Ignacio and I tried frantically to retrieve the data without any success. The loss of all that information was totally devastating to us knowing that without it, ihaveanidea activities could be crippled.

We both feared the end of ihaveanidea was near and cracked open a few beers.

Who knows what caused the problem, it wasn’t a virus, but something made the read-write heads crash and obliterate the magnetic signal that would allow us to access the data on the hard drive. And with the data on my hard drive being incredibly critical to the success or even survival of ihaveanidea we worried that the data was lost forever.

Yet with technology the way it is nowadays, apparently there are very few situations where no data at all can be recovered. Although, as we began to find out, many companies claim they have the capabilities to retrieve your data, when in fact they’re just some guy with a Web site working in a computer store or out of his basements testing out software.

Fortunately, someone we met along the way mentioned CBL Data Recovery Technologies, a Canadian company. Both Ignacio and I had no idea they even existed.

So after talking to a customer service rep about our problem, we packed up the hard drive and sent it out to their closest lab in Markham Ontario, just outside of Toronto. What did we have to lose? With CBL’s “No Data, No Charge” data recovery guarantee, a ‘never say die’ attitude and a 90% data recovery success rate, we crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.

“CBL has one mission: To recover more data than any other data recovery service on the planet. For data loss due to hardware failure, natural disaster or software malfunction on any operating system, regardless of format.” – www.cbldatarecovery.com

They can even retrieve data from your digital camera and your iPod so you never lose that seven-minute Jimmy Swift song. Or if you want to get rid of your data for good (maybe you are selling or donating your old computer to someone), you can wipe a drive completely clean with CBL’s Data Shredder Version 2.0 (freeware) which erases all confidential information from your drive. In our case we REALLY wanted the data!

Once CBL technicians determined that the data recovery was possible, they emailed us immediately. Then using their replication technology CBL duplicated the data on the hard drive bit by bit reducing the risk of causing further damage to the information before recovering 100 per cent of the lost data and returning it to us with the same file names, same characteristics, identifiers and in the very same structure and location as before the failure occurred. Beauty, eh?

Miraculously CBL recovered nearly 80GB of extremely valuable information to the ihaveanidea project!

Ignacio and I started drinking again.

Okay, I admit, this article may come off as sounding like the world’s biggest advertorial. And in a way it kind of is. The only difference is that CBL didn’t ask for this write up: I just was so unbelievably impressed with the result and above all incredibly grateful that they were able to retrieve all of our important files and documents that keep ihaveanidea running for all of you.

I figured the least I could do is give them a quick plug and a big thank you.

As we get more and more digital, the demand for data recovery has grown such that CBL has launched operations in 10 countries with great success, including China, and has plans to expand even further. It should be obvious to you now if it wasn’t already that anyone, anywhere, can experience a similar hardware failure at some point (so remember to backup your files).

And should you or someone you know experience the same loss of data that we did, rest assured that CBL can save your information.

Canadian ingenuity is alive and well!